Follow the Prophet

Escaping the sins of the father2starsGo to showtimes

Published 5:30 am, Thursday, April 29, 2010

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Let us approachFollow the Prophet with a couple of stern warnings.

Warning A: It addresses a worthy but lurid topic. It tells the ghastly tale of Avery, a 15-year-old girl (Annie Burgstede) who escapes the clutches of a polygamist cult in Utah on the eve of her “wedding” to a creepy old prophet (Tom Noonan) with underage wives. She's also escaping her unctuous, incestuous father (Ghost Whisperer's David Conrad), who tries to rape her as an aid to salvation.

Warning B: It's not a subtle film. Directed by TV veteran Drew Ann Rosenberg (Saints & Sinners) from a screenplay by actor Robert Chimento, it chugs along on hasty plot turns and an unfortunate bent toward garish exaggeration. Movies on shocking or controversial subjects work best when they stick to the facts and refrain from sensationalizing. Follow the Prophet doesn't refrain from much; nuanced films have been made about father-daughter incest, but this isn't The Sweet Hereafter. (Nor is it likely to entice Big Love aficionados with its broad-stroke damnation of polygamy.)

All the same, it has a few strengths to recommend it. The first is Chimento's rumpled, righteous performance as Colonel Marks, a grizzled old undercover Army dude who discovers Avery hiding in his truck and helps her find a backwoods group of fundamentalist Mormon runaways. For all their earnest acting, the runaway camp-out scenes are awkward and forced — as is the arrival of a rustic sheriff lady (Diane Venora) who knows everything about everything and answers to nobody. The plot in general lays on some massive narrative bunkum (conspiracies, men in black and lots of old-Army-dude recon), which is strange, considering all the actual polygamist sects convicted on actual charges in the real world lately. It's not as though there's a dearth of stories out there.

Yet Chimento has interesting folds in his face and his psyche, and Burgstede draws out the rebellious spirit in a traumatized girl who long believed that the only path to heaven was obedience to “a good and faithful man.” I wish the film hadn't required her to get drunk and writhe naked before a fire, but that's hardly her fault.

I close with a third warning that doubles as a big-time spoiler alert, so quit reading now if you'd rather not partake. The climax involves some really nasty business, nastier even than that initial scene with Avery and Dad in her bedroom. There's a later scene with those same characters in that same room, only this time — for noble reasons — Avery submits to her father, a bombshell softened by a quick cut away before the deed is done. That's followed by a sequence in which two other characters calmly replay the spectacle on video as though checking out some viral clip on YouTube.

Finally, in the prophet's home, icky splits time with ridiculous. The icky: He instructs the girl to kneel before him (and not in prayer). The ridiculous: He's wearing baggy long johns. Consider yourselves warned.